Grens exposes the officials' criminal collusion

Ewert Grens exposes the officials' criminal collusion at a meeting in the Government Offices of Sweden, turning the police’s hidden records and the officials’ own recordings into evidence against the system that concealed them. His presentation links the use of criminal informants to investigations conducted without crucial information, and brings the human cost of that arrangement into the room: three days earlier, Grens had fired a lethal shot and had been left carrying the guilt of that decision.

The concealed record

The confrontation follows Grens’s discovery that the case information available to investigators was not the whole record. Official files described incidents incompletely; a separate collection of secret intelligence reports contained information that had not reached the investigators responsible for the ordinary cases. Grens had found that the incomplete material available to him, Sven Sundkvist, Mariana Hermansson, and Lars Ågestam had contributed to an investigation being downgraded. The division between the official investigation and the confidential intelligence record was therefore not just administrative: it shaped what could be investigated and what could be established in court.

Grens searches the computer records back through the previous year and finds 302 secret intelligence reports. Several are familiar to him; others concern investigations that collapsed even though relevant knowledge was already held within the police. The reports describe informants whose work against one crime had given rise to another, while the second crime was marginalized. He tells the prosecutor that the cases are present in the secret record, alongside the truth that the investigators were never given. His claim is specific: the public-facing investigations and the intelligence reports constitute parallel accounts of events, with the latter withholding information that could have affected the former.

He singles out three of the 302 cases as examples, then turns to Ågestam’s role. Grens says that Ågestam was involved in twenty-three cases in which he prosecuted unsuccessfully, and argues that those cases were closed without the information contained in the secret reports. The confrontation does not present this as a single clerical mistake. Its scale—the three examples, the 302 reports, and the twenty-three prosecutions—makes the concealed information look like a recurring institutional practice, with consequences for investigations and trials.

Footage and recordings

Grens brings a laptop into the meeting and loads a CD. He remarks that the laptop belongs to the police, while the CD player he produces afterward is his own. The older player had been given to him by Ågestam nearly five years earlier, after a minor altercation; Grens says he had scarcely used it until the preceding weeks, when he began listening to recordings. The contrast between the police machine and his personal device marks two different forms of access: one presents seized visual evidence, the other carries audio from a meeting the officials had not expected to hear again.

The security-camera footage came from cameras positioned above the glass security desk and in a second-floor corridor. Grens had seized it a couple of days earlier. Though jumpy and slightly blurred, it shows five people entering a room in the Government Offices of Sweden within a short period. He pauses the footage on a still image: a man stands with his arms outstretched while another person, behind him, has his hands on the man’s back. Grens identifies the first as a man with a criminal record who was working as an informant for the City Police when the image was recorded. He identifies the second as a chief superintendent.

The still makes the concealed arrangement visible without making the image itself a complete account. Grens supplies what the footage cannot: the identities and institutional meaning of the two people shown. He asks the officials whether they recognize the people and the room, then directs attention to the position of the man being searched and the senior officer behind him. The informant is not shown as an abstract source in a file but as a criminal being handled by a police superior inside a government building. In the scene, the footage gives Grens a visible point of entry into a relationship the authorities could otherwise deny.

Grens also reveals that he knows Sven had recently gone to the United States to meet Erik Wilson, taking a similar laptop. He then plays recordings from the meeting in the room where the officials are now gathered. He identifies the date as May 10 and the time as 15:49, and advances the recording by twenty-eight minutes and twenty-four seconds before directing the listeners to a speaker whose voice he expects them to recognize. Later, he advances it by a further twenty-two minutes and seventeen seconds to reach another voice from the same meeting. The exact markers and the repeated act of playback make the past meeting present as a sequence of verifiable statements, rather than a claim resting solely on Grens’s recollection.

What the meeting reveals

In the later recording, a speaker says that Paula does not have time for Västmannagatan. Grens turns toward the national police commissioner, while the state secretary and the other officials remain before him. The remark connects the handling of the informant operation to the Västmannagatan case: the recording shows that the informant’s activity and the demands of another investigation were being weighed within the same private discussion. Grens then condemns the practices the recording exposes—lying to colleagues, burning employees, and granting immunity to some crimes so that others can be solved. He presents these not as detached policy questions, but as choices made by people whose voices and actions have now been linked to the evidence in the room.

The state secretary says that, in her official capacity, she guarantees Grens will not be charged for what happened. That assurance sits alongside the charges Grens enumerates: failure to report a crime, protection of a criminal, conspiracy to commit crime, perjury, gross misuse of public office, and forgery of documents. He does not frame the meeting as a request for the officials to explain themselves; he names the possible offenses and waits. They remain seated and silent. His catalogue turns the language of institutional management back upon the officials, defining the conduct he believes their secrecy has enabled in legal terms.

Guilt and accusation

The meeting’s institutional accusations are inseparable from Grens’s own reckoning. Three days earlier, he had made a decision he had dreaded throughout his working life: firing a lethal shot at another person. At the table, he says he will no longer carry the guilt, and insists that he was not responsible for the death. He also denies responsibility for a woman’s death and states that he did not commit murder. Then he points at the officials one by one and assigns the responsibility to them.

This declaration is an accusation made in the confrontation, not a judicial finding recorded in the scene. Its force comes from the way Grens joins a personal burden to the larger evidence: the concealed reports, the officials’ recorded discussion, and the visible handling of an informant. He moves slowly across the room, first toward the window and the birds, then back to the people at the table. The officials, who had seemed ready to leave earlier, are no longer in a hurry to go. Their silence provides no resolution, but it leaves Grens’s charge unanswered within the meeting.

Institutional significance

The novel’s closing factual coda broadens the implications of the scene. It states that the Swedish Police Service has for many years used criminals as covert human intelligence sources, while denying and concealing that cooperation. It further states that crimes have been marginalized in the pursuit of other investigations, with preliminary investigations and trials consequently conducted without correct information. The coda also describes fabricated or extensively altered backgrounds as tools for developing credible informant identities, and says that exposed informants may be denied by authorities while the infiltrated organization is left to respond to the exposure.

Against that account, Grens’s presentation is more than a personal confrontation with officials. It gives narrative form to the two-track system described in the coda: one record made available to ordinary investigators, and another kept within secret intelligence reporting. The camera image, the dated audio, and the totals from the report search let Grens show how concealment operates across evidence, procedure, and responsibility. The scene ends without depicting a prosecution or a formal admission from those at the table. Its decisive outcome is exposure: the officials can no longer be addressed only through the incomplete official account, because Grens has placed the concealed account before them.